Several members of the Fedora project, which is the basis for the Linux distributions offered by Red Hat, have formed Fedora EMEA, based in Germany on the fringe of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

According to its chair, Gerold Kassube, the NGO will be looking to promote the project externally and to help Fedora become more independent of its main sponsor Red Hat. Kassube, who is a Fedora ambassador (this is a role created by Red Hat as a kind of liaison officer between Red Hat and the community) said: "We will be looking to become slightly less dependent on our main sponsor in this way. And this would help us organize fairs like Linuxtag in a more efficient way". However, Red Hat will remain one of the project’s most important partners. Besides Kassube other project members from the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland were voted onto the board of the new NGO.

The NGO will mainly be financed from donations. Red Hat community ambassadors have not been available to comment on this development thus far.

More than 5,000 people gathered in Brussels for FOSDEM 2009. Attendees learned to guard their in-demand netbooks, and representatives from major open source projects explained the agendas for upcoming releases.

Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.